"Poems": Between the Voice of Charles Simic and the Voice of the Translator

With this post, Intent continues its series of reviews dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian publications. The reviews for Intent as part of this project are written by Maria Galina—a Ukrainian writer, poet, and literary critic, and winner of literary awards.

Last year, a collection of poems by Charles Simic (“Poems,” published by M.O. Bondarenko, 2025) was released in Odesa, translated by Oleksandr Hint. It didn’t make much of a splash. In my opinion, this is a result of the very same insularity of Odesa’s cultural scene that has been discussed for—what, not just a few... years? Decades?

The thing is, it’s not so much that Odessa isn’t very interested in what’s happening outside right now, but rather that the outside world isn’t very interested in what’s happening in Odessa. Actually, I hope that the Internet is destined to fix this somehow. Well, we’ll see.

I’ll digress a bit here. When I took on this column, I decided for myself that I would only tackle poetry in extreme cases. Well, it’s clear why: poetry books are published and presented, but they rarely become major events. Because, to be honest, not every line of verse is poetry (Odesa is no exception). Poetry is generally more complicated than any other genre. Genre fiction, diaries, reference books—whatever you name it—all have their own audience, readers, and fans, who most likely don’t write books themselves. But with poetry, it’s a different story. Aside from symbolic capital, neither the author nor the publisher usually gains anything. Poetry is, in general, an aristocratic pursuit, since the author has no motives other than internal ones.

Yes, the readership for contemporary poetry is limited, and, as a rule, such readers write something themselves. But when it makes an impact, it really makes an impact. Because poetry is precisely what shapes and molds national consciousness, maintains unity through cultural codes—a kind of meme—and serves as the glue that binds different generations together... What am I telling you—haven’t you heard of Zhadan? Or Izdryk (who, by the way, is coming to Odesa soon)? Or hasn’t Maksym Kryvtsov become a national phenomenon (posthumously)?

Poetic translations, however, are a different story. Because they serve a slightly different purpose—not only to convey a certain phenomenon to representatives of another culture, but, if we’re lucky, to fill a certain cultural gap, a literary void that, due to various factors, has remained unaddressed by national literature. Examples include Lorca in Lukash’s translations or the haiku tradition, which has developed here to the point of excess (in reality, it’s not haiku, but the movement emerged precisely as a translation of the traditional Japanese form).

Incidentally, I’ve always been intrigued by the mystery of a situation where we have a single original text and several equally valid translations, none of which is definitive. This opportunity to have, instead of a single text, several that are more or less variations—among which we are free to choose the one that appeals to us most—is, I would say, an existential miracle.

So if we’re talking about poetry, we’re also talking about translation. There are two types of translations—those done on commission and those done simply because the translator finds it interesting and enjoyable. Surprisingly, the result can be good in both cases, but the translator’s motivations differ. This is precisely the second case, and the story begins like a mystery, because Oleksandr Hint had to go on quite a quest to obtain permission from the copyright holders. First, AI helped him get in touch with those involved with Simik’s work in the United States (which turned out to be a university in New Hampshire, where the poet’s archive is kept), and through them, he reached Simik’s family, who not only granted permission for publication but also provided materials, including photographs from the family archive. So, in fact, this alone shows that the translator, Oleksandr Hint, a poet from Odesa (I intentionally didn’t write “Odesa poet” here, because that brings us back to that bubble), approached the work with great responsibility.

What else is important? This is a bilingual edition: together with the originals, the selected collection—totaling 256 pages—covers poems from 1962 to 2022. So if anyone wants to compare how that “author/translator” duo works, they have every opportunity to do so.

In the preface, the translator writes about the well-known “difficulties of translation,” because Simik’s poems are not quite free verse; they have a kind of fluid rhythm; they’re complex, intellectual, and ironic, featuring recurring themes and a symbolic framework. So it’s clear that the challenges here require sophisticated artistic solutions.

Now for a little bit of cheating. Because I myself wrote one of the two forewords for this book. So now I’ll turn to my own foreword and borrow a little from it. If not word for word, then certain points. Well, here’s the first one:

“Dušan Simic (May 9, 1938, Belgrade – January 9, 2023, Dover, New Hampshire) was an American poet of Serbian descent. He was the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2007. He was born in Yugoslavia, and his childhood in a war-torn country shaped his outlook on life: in Simic’s own words, he was “in a sense a product of history, and his guiding forces were Stalin and Hitler.” He emigrated to the United States with his mother in 1954…"

In other words, Simic is a Serb, an immigrant. He entered an English-speaking environment at the age of 16, as a young man—but a mature young man, because people grow up quickly during wartime. And he wrote in a language he had not known since childhood.

We’ll come back to the language later, but let’s talk about the “road agents”— the dictators who unleashed World War II and destroyed the normal lives of millions... Now that the tectonic plates of history have shifted, parallels suggest themselves, and for us, of all people, the situation is clearer than for anyone else. Only the last name of our “road agent” begins with “p.” Who knows, perhaps somewhere in the States or in Britain, a family of refugees from a war-torn city has now settled down, having brought with them a talented young man who will one day become a renowned English-language poet.

Again, from Wikipedia: “Simik began writing poetry almost immediately after mastering the English language and published his first poem in *The Chicago Review* at the age of 21…”

In other words, a person who is not a native English speaker eventually mastered the language to the point of becoming a poet laureate. The parallels with our situation are slightly different here, but they do exist. Russian aggression has accelerated the break with imperial narratives and with the Russian language and culture, which were once so influential: we can now name a number of successful Ukrainian poets and writers who began their careers as Russian-language authors. For them, turning to the Ukrainian language is a conscious act—a political, aesthetic, and ethical decision.

So it’s no surprise that it was Oleksandr Hint— a talented poet and translator—who undertook the translation of Simik’s work, immediately tackling two related challenges: mastering the English-language essence of Simik’s poetry and immersing himself in the language of Ukraine—a language that is native, yet at one time nearly eradicated in Odesa due to the deliberate and aggressive policies of two empires. However, it is precisely this similarity/dissimilarity that creates certain points of tension, without which a good translation is impossible.

And here we return to the mystery of translation. For a translation is never identical to the original. Not in the sense that it is always inferior to the original—no. But a translator always leaves an imprint of their personality and personal style on their translations.

Simik is a precise, dry, and even academic poet (perhaps precisely because of his linguistic erudition and training, or perhaps due to his personal traits and psychophysiology) even in his absurdities and oddities. Hint, himself a representative of the Southern Poetic School with its excess and vitality, here and there adds a certain baroque quality to Simik’s work in his translations.

Let’s see.

In Simika’s poem “CHARON’S COSMOLOGY,” Charon simply searches the pockets of the dead, tossing the junk into the Styx:

“No one complains he’s got/ Their pockets to go through/ In one a crust of bread, in another a sausage/ Once in a long while a mirror / Or a book which he throws / Overboard into the dark river / Swift and cold and deep”

In Hint’s version:

"And no one complains that / He rummages through their pockets / Here a crust, there a sausage / And sometimes even a little mirror / Or a book that he flings / Into the dark river where the library / Is full-flowing, cold, and swift"

Literally, this:

"No one complains that he searches their pockets—a crust of bread in one, a piece of sausage in another. Every now and then he even finds a mirror or a book, which he tosses overboard into a dark, fast-flowing, cold, deep river..."

So where Simik simply has “a river,” here a “library” unexpectedly appears. This, of course, is a deliberate device, an additional metaphor. And while in Simik’s work an entire poem is often an expanded metaphor, Hint adds a metaphor—let’s say—of the second order. Moreover, despite Simik’s dry, matter-of-fact style, the slang word “shmanae” appears in the translation—Charon turns into something like a camp guard. In fact, the mountains of corpses he transports from one shore to the other, without even distinguishing which is which—this is already a direct reference to the trauma of war, to a mass slaughter, and Hint only intensifies it through additional devices.

Another example is the poem “PRODIGY,” where the original reads:

"I grew up bent over a chessboard. / I loved the word endgame. <…> / It was a small house near a Roman graveyard. / Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes./ A retired professor of astronomy taught me how to play. / That must have been in 1944/ <…> I’m told but do not believe/ that that summer I witnessed / men hung from telephone poles. // I remember my mother / blindfolding me a lot. / She had a way of tucking my head / suddenly under her overcoat…"

In Hinta:

"I grew up in the shape of the letter 'G' over a chessboard. / I liked the word 'endgame.' <…> The house was small, near the Roman cemetery. / Its windowpanes rattled from airplanes and tanks. / A retired astronomy professor taught me how to play. I think it was in 1944 / <…> I was told—I still don’t believe it— / that summer I saw / people hanged from telephone poles. // I remember how my mother / would often blindfold me. / She had a habit of suddenly hiding / my head under her coat."

In Simik’s story, the protagonist simply grew up hunched over his desk. But in Hint’s story, that letter “G” appears, and for good reason—later it is echoed in the line where the hanged men dangle from telephone poles. And while in Simik’s version the protagonist simply remembers how his mother would often prevent him from looking, covering his eyes tucking his head under her coat, in Hint’s version she “blindfolded him”—another subconscious translator’s allusion to those condemned to death. As a result, through precise “edits” to the original text, Hint seems to dissect the mournful detachment of the narrator, who rushes in the finale to shift the focus from the hanged men to the chess tournament masters. While in Simik’s version it reads, “I was told, but I don’t believe that that summer…,” in Hint’s version it reads, “I was told, and I still don’t believe—that summer…,” so that “still” already points to a hidden denial, a reluctance to remember...

Our historical experience, to be honest, isn’t very different from Simik’s historical experience, so this interpretation also subconsciously points to trauma. But this is the translator’s trauma, and it requires a slightly different set of tools. For someone lacking such a shared experience, the translation might well be devoid of any interpretation. All the more so because the theme of execution clearly haunts the poet as well—the following poem, “GALLOWS ETIQUETTE,” interprets it with his characteristic dry irony. The hint in the previous text seems to bring it to light, adding emotional depth to Simik’s dry, academic style, as if spelling out what the poet leaves off-screen.

Simic spent his entire life grappling with the hidden trauma of war (“Millions died; each was innocent. /<…> The President / Spoke of war as an elixir of love. <…> That day, soldiers were everywhere / And crowds of refugees on the roads. / Of course, they were all simply swept away / With a single hand...”)—and, in my view, that trauma shaped him. Once the “beast of war” had seized him in its claws, it never let go; the images gradually become harsher and darker...

That evening, when the first snow fell,

The woman’s trembling finger

Goes down the list of losses.

It’s cold in the house, and the list is long.

It contains all our names.

But perhaps the most poignant poem in the collection—if we’ve all drifted a bit toward Homer right now—sounds like this in Hint’s translation:

"I like / That Achilles / Was killed / And his friend Patroclus— / And even the mad Hector— / And all the Greek and Trojan / Golden youth / Were more or less / Professionally slaughtered / So that at last / Peace and tranquility might come / (The gods closed their lips for a moment) / And you can hear / The birds singing / And a daughter asking her mother / If she can go to the well / Of course you can / Along that wonderful path That winds through / The olive grove.”

It’s all over; the gods of war have finally been slain, and the birds can be heard.
 

Марія Галіна